by any other name
by Johanna Night
Summary: They call him Gregory House, The Misanthropic Bastard, and the Son-of-a-Bitch. They call her Allison Cameron, the virtuous one, the polite one, the gracious one. But the two of them make Cameron and House-the ones in love. For love, by any other name, is still love. T for language


_They call him Gregory House, The Misanthropic Bastard, and the Son-of-a-Bitch._

Gregory John House is the name that is written on his birth certificate. Later on in life he will demand the John excluded at all times. But Greg is the name that Blythe House cooes when she trails her finger down his cheek, grinning when the infant kicks his legs and gives a tiny scowl.

Greg is the name his coach yells when he scores the winning goal in the lacrosse finals, pumping his fists in the air. It's the name the cheerleaders chant over and over until his name slurs into nothing.

It's the name his father spits out when the belt lashes down onto his back.

_You disrespectful bastard you useless little bitch don't come back you know you don't belong apologize to me now_

When he's fourteen he tries to run, and gets halfway across the block before his father catches up. Then his chest is against Mrs. Wilderly's car and his shirt is being ripped open and lashes are raining down right there

_Helphelphelp_

But no one answers.

Greg is the name his mother calls him when he comes home, the name she whispers when her fingers ghost across the shredded skin on his back. Bandages wrap around so tight he can't breathe-or maybe that's the pain. He doesn't really know.

I will get out of here, he vows one night with his face pressed to the wall and his teeth clamped firmly in a dusty pillow. I'll make a difference.

College makes a new Gregory House.

He's the model student all until that one test-he would find out later that the boy next to him had answered the first question wrong (Pulmonary Edema) but as of now he's ruined. And Lisa Cuddy is left behind, only the scratches on his back and the memory of his name on her lips to prove her existence.

Stacy's next. She's beautiful but deadly and Greg thinks he's met his soulmate-she doesn't expect too much of him. There are nights where they're tangled together and he thinks he could die like this and be a happy man.

Beauty never lasts.

Then the pain comes. Just a nagging ache in his right thigh at first, but then a persistent pull and then a full blown stabbing agony. He's not drug-seeking, honest, but it _hurts_ and after that one reckless incident he's on his own.

Then he happens to stumble into Lisa Cuddy's clinic. She sees him like that, wild eyed and shivering from pain, clutching Stacy's arm for balance and support. She promises him it's going to be okay. Greg is the name she calls him.

Everybody lies, because the next day he diagnoses himself with an infarction. And by then, it's too late.

_Just let me do this,_ he tells Stacy. _I'd rather die than lose my leg._

_Don't do this, _Stacy begs. _I can't live without you._

He'd rather die than be in the pain he wakes up in, a mind numbing agony that shatters his thoughts. He'd almost rather be in that ice bath again, again in his childhood days with his father breathing _Greg_ into his ear with sadistic glee.

He's going to be like this _for the rest of his life._

He kicks Stacy out of his room and asks for Wilson instead-his best friend isn't the one who authorized those surgeons to cut out a chunk of his life.

_I can't live without you,_ Stacy had said. Everybody lies. She's gone.

Vicodin becomes his friend. Two pills take away the emptiness of the bed around him, take away the dull ache in his heart and the piercing one in his thigh, throbbing in unison. Two more send him into oblivion.

The job at PPTH manages to both save and destroy him.

It's the end of his old life and the start of his new one, and for a moment he looks back. Then Cuddy holds out her hand-so formal-and says, with a warm, _Lisa_ smile, "Welcome to PPTH, Dr. House," and he makes up his mind.

"Call me House," he says. And smirks back.

House is the name Wilson yells when he's done something reckless, insane, or totally _awesome. _House is the name that Cuddy screeches when he 'forgets' his clinic hours, is the name that his fellows sigh in exasperation when he manages to both kill and save his new patient.

House is everything that Greg wasn't: Greg was the rebellious boy struggling to come out on top; House breaks all the rules and starts anew. Greg was terrified; House is fearless-at least, in the eyes of others.

_You are who people think you are._

So when his mother calls one Christmas (she's never called before, why now?) and says, "Hello, Greg," he's almost forgotten the journey.

House blinks then. "Call me-" he begins to say, and then stops. _Call me House,_ he meant. But then he looks at the phone in his hand and swallows. "Call me later," he corrects, hoping she misses the pause. "I have a conference."

Later, he will have an hour long chat with her, not sure whether to cringe or smile when she calls him Greg.

Cameron finds him after that conversation. On impulse he invites her to dinner, just a casual thing. _ Boss-employee dinner_, he says to her when her face flushes just so. _Call it nosiness._

Really, he should have said, _call it love. _

They wine and dine and hell, he likes it much better when she's not in a dress and he's not in a suit and tie and they don't have to play the role of desperately trying couple. Because once he stops trying it all falls into place. She slides into his heart and stays there, stubbornly clinging to his veins and tugging sometimes to remind him she's still there.

And one day he imagines maybe Cameron will call him Greg enough times to erase those bad memories and fill the hollows inside him with her voice. Fill the hollows inside him with her love.

But for now he stares at the glass doors of his office: _Gregory House, M.D._, it reads, white against glass.

The two names are the story of his life.

* * *

_They call her the selfless one, the virtuous one, the naive one._

Ally Hamilton is the good one.

She's been good for her entire life-it feels good being good, gratifying, rewarding, even. Ally is the name her mom compliments her using when she makes her bed at age four, the name her teacher beams to the class at how well a job she's done on her family tree.

Ally is the name her friends call her at school, throwing their arms around her and grinning like fools. It's the name she's used to; the name she responds to; the name she loves.

People call her a goody-two-shoes, and she doesn't protest. Takes it as a compliment, really. Because what's better than having a moral compass, what's better than having a sense of compassion?

Innocence looks good on her.

Her first 'bad' thing is when, at age 17, she's on a car with four of her friends. They're drunk and stoned and all of them are together but all alone, and she's sober enough to drive. But the drunk teenager hanging out the window catches suspicion and they're arrested.

Cam, Jeremy, and Haley get slapped with four months of community service. Andy gets a heavy fine for the pinch of marijuana he has in his pocket, and Ally spends the night in a holding cell-dark and damp. The woman next to her smells like smoke and the man slumped on the tiny bench has pupils so dilated he might as well be flying.

She tucks herself into a corner, and there, she promises herself she's never going to do such a stupid thing again. And she never does.

At 19 she turns herself in for cheating on a test. At 20 she reminds her professor of a grading mistake, simply because she knows she could never have lived with a false grade.

At age 22 she completes an internship at the Mayo clinic.

At age 23 she marries Bob Timothy Cameron. Ally is the name on the diamond ring.

When good people die they shouldn't be alone, she thinks, and she does love him. She loves him as much as she's ever loved anyone. But she's thinking, when good people die there should be an impact on the world. There should be.

Everything and nothing changes when she gets married. She doesn't tell her family because she doesn't want their pity, their sympathy, their complete incomprehension on how willingly she tied herself to a dying man. They will never understand.

Allison Cameron becomes her name. She holds a part of him in her everyday life.

_Call me Cameron._

So when she meets Dr. Gregory House, she's floored by how fast she falls for him. Those blue eyes, reading her like an MRI. Seeing right past her outside and into her soul. So this is love, she muses, the burning desire to touchfeellove him.

He doesn't return those feelings. Lobby art, he calls her, and she's not sure whether to be offended that she's so one-dimensional to him or touched that he thinks she's pleasing to the eye. She settles on a hint of both.

She's not sure how she works up the courage to ask him. Their first non-date is a disaster and their second date is even more so, but somehow they get it in their minds to find strength for a third. And that one...

...is amazing.

She learns more about him that evening than she's had her two years working for him, and the alcohol makes them both relax enough to be sufficiently open. And in that openness she finds that he's starting to splinter around the edges, and with the expertise she's mastered through the years, she puts him back together.

_Not everybody lies,_ she tells him, and his lips curve under her fingers. _I'm telling the truth when I say I love you. I'll always be telling the truth when I say I love you._ _I'm not going anywhere._

_You are who people think you are_, he says. _Then you must be perfect_, she says, _because that's who you are to me._

The Vicodin bottle remains half full all throughout the week and well into the second. When she comments, he remarks that she should bottle up her love and sell it as an opiate. "It would make top charts,_"_ he says. It's his way of saying _I love you too._

It's beautiful, really. He calls it crazy, she calls it hope. But love, by any other name, is still love.

They settle into a routine of sorts, an unspoken agreement. Cameron is the name he calls her in the office when she's sorting through his mail, looking up at him over the rims of her glasses. Allison is the name he calls her at home when her head is on her shoulder and his arm is around her waist, the name he calls her when they're breathing the same hot heavy air and his eyes are a shade of blue she's never seen before.

Together they make one Allison Cameron, a woman who feels so loved it threatens to overflow.

At age 29 her name becomes Allison Cameron-House, a memoir for the best choices of her life.

* * *

**A/N: I do not own House, M.D. Thanks for reading!**

**~Johanna**


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